It took me a long time to warm up to Bruce Springsteen--even though he was a star in the northeast before he began playing football stadiums nationwide, and even though he and I grew up in the same state, there was something about his music that seemed off-putting to me. It was only when the Born in the USA album went multi-multi-platinum that I learned to stop worrying and love Bruce Springsteen.
In retrospect, it was probably my fault that it took so long to appreciate "The Boss". The musical interests of my friends and I in high school predominately leaned towards British rock and its blues-based and arty offshoots. The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Yes were all favorites of my classmates and I, along with expatriate Jimi Hendrix, who merged American R&B with mid-sixties English power pop.
Bruce Builds On Pre-Beatles Rock
Springsteen's music was largely built on the same roots that these musicians also had, but his goal was to emulate American music pre-Beatles, not necessarily to create the same abstract psychedelic sonic landscapes so popular with the musicians that proceeded the Fab Four. To paraphrase something Keith Richards once said about the Stones, unlike many of his 1970s contemporaries, Springsteen, especially on his early albums, was as interested in the roll as the rock.
He developed a sonic vocabulary all his own, with a band that had an idiosyncratic sound eventually built around two keyboardists, two guitarists, and a sax player. And he wrote songs to fit those players, shaping his arrangements to suit the talents of the men in his band, rather than forcing them to play pre-written arrangements.
All of this is documented in Rikky Rooksby's new book, Bruce Springsteen: Songwriting Secrets. Rooksby is the author of How To Write Songs On Guitar, Inside Classic Rock Tracks, Melody, and other books focusing on post-1950s pop music.
Early in Bruce's career, he had a reputation in New Jersey bars as being a hip young guitar slinger, which eventually gave way to his songwriting prowess. What direction a guitarist goes in is something that most rock musicians must choose at some point in their careers, especially when most realize that they're not the second coming of Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen. There's a quote in Rooksby's book by "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen's longtime lieutenant in the E Street Band, that sums up Bruce's decision, which led the way to his astonishing success as a writer:
By '72, pretty much everything had shifted to the songs. By '72, pretty much everything that could be done with the guitar had been done, with the exception of Eddie Van Halen, who had yet to come. What were you gonna do that Clapton, Beck, Page, and Hendrix hadn't done? However good a guitar player you were at that point, you now had to work within the context of the song: our guitar playing was gonna come in handy and be useful, but not so much to just go off on long solos to impress somebody anymore.Is Springsteen Sexist?
Occasionally, Rooksby's English university background gets the better of him, particularly in the section where he advises writers not to use the same sort of language that dominated Springsteen's writing in the first decade or so of his career. As Rooksby writes, Springsteen's lyric writing "has many virtues but it has patches blighted by one particular cliché, which can be summed up in three dangerous words: 'pretty', 'little', and 'girl':
So we find "All the little pretties" ('Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out'), "I met a little girl" ('Stolen Car'), "Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?" ('I'm On Fire'), "And drove that little girl away" ('Racing In The Streets'), "little girl" ('Promised Land'), "Hey little girl" ('Darlington County'), "pretty little miss" ('Working On The Highway'), "Little girl, I wanna marry you" ('I Wanna Marty You'), "Little girl with the long blond hair" ('County Fair'). The problem is that both "little" and "girl" tend to diminish. Putting them together doubles the effect, one that is hardly suitable to apply to a grown woman. The effect is to suggest a certain dumb machismo on the part of the speaker. This is unfortunate, because it confirms the suspicions of people who are prejudiced against Springsteen's work.I certainly understand his point (and hopefully he'll write the same sort of thing if he ever gets around to covering "The Songwriting Secrets of Eminem"). However, as somebody who worked for a decade beginning in the late '70s in a South Jersey liquor store, and spent more time than he'd normally care to admit in Jersey dive bars, Springsteen's lyrics--especially his 1970s and early 1980s lyrics, when he was at the height of his commercial and critical success--are a pretty accurate reflection of how many lower middle class young men in New Jersey talked back then. (And probably still do.) There's a reason why Springsteen built such an enormous following on the east coast early in his career--he was one of them, a legitimate "working class hero".
Furthermore, such demeaning references sometimes introduce a note (probably unintended) of condescension.
So in 'Dancing In The Dark' the unnecessary "little" in "Worrying 'bout your little world falling apart" makes it sound as though the speaker thinks his woman's world is of no matter (she might see it differently!). Similarly, in 'Racing In The Streets' the word "pretty" in the line "And all her pretty dreams are torn" implies her dreams are not worth much and she wasn't mature enough to see through them. But again, maybe now she would rather have stayed with the dude from LA in his Camaro than with the guy who spends his evenings racing in the streets.
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